Basel, 11–14. XII. 15
Dear Friend,
In order to write you openly and honestly, I have to overcome certain intellectual resistances, for I know from experience that it is nearly impossible for the introvert to acknowledge important problems, if life does not force him to gain knowledge. So, although I do not fancy that my answer will be able to tell you anything, I want to follow your invitation as best I can.258
I understand very well why extraverts have so far offered you only vague allusions to what you should not [sic] acknowledge. It is nearly impossible to talk about this intellectually, because this is about things that can be fully grasped only by feeling, never by the intellect. If for you clearness means that a problem is described intellectually in a clear way, you demand the impossible from me in wishing that I “clear the air” in such a way.
I want to come back to the, admittedly unclear, allusion I made in my last letter: I spoke of my feeling that you cannot appreciate something in the extraverted character, and the most valuable in it to boot.
The most valuable trait of the extravert must lie in the qualities of his feeling, and I would say that the most valuable among them is his capacity for love. In my opinion, this constitutes the core of his individuality; it contains his “divinity.” As a matter of fact, however, this core contains not only a high, divine, and beautiful love but also a low, devilish, and ugly love.
I do not want to write an apotheosis of love. For me Plato’s works, especially the connection he makes between the Eros and the beautiful, are such an apotheosis. Other examples can be found in the Bible.
When I read your letter, the first thing that came to mind was a motto (!) for my answer, and I do not want to withhold it from you: “Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love” (Revelation 2:4).259
So let me expand on my vague allusion by saying that I have the feeling that you do not, in your feeling, accept the power of Eros—as Plato understood it—and the greatness of love—as Christ (but not the apostles, or contemporary Christians) taught it—to the extent it must be accepted (for the path taken by the mechanism of the sublimation of feelings is via these concepts, via the symbol of devoted love and sympathy, while the path taken by the respective mechanism of the sublimation of thinking is via the symbol of sacrifice).
Now you will demand that I supply evidence for the correctness of this feeling. I could gather evidence from three different areas:
1) From your own works. The problem of love is hardly mentioned in your work on the libido, for example. Spontaneous love is something infantile. Love seems to be understandable only as a manifestation of the pleasure-unpleasure principle. Love is playing the savior or the missionary, etc., etc. For the moment I do not want to enter into these proofs in more detail. The critical part of my work on Tristan260 will deal with that.
2) From what I observed in your reactions to other people close to you. I will, God forbid!, never produce this evidence; because it is up to those people, once they have developed into independent individuals, who also acknowledge their feelings, to react to your reactions, and not up to me to criticize the latter.
3) The only area I want to deal with in more detail here are your reactions toward me.
You write that you acknowledge the difference between my and your way of thinking and feeling. I have indeed nice pieces of evidence for this. In acknowledging their difference, you acknowledge their existence but not necessarily the value (not: usefulness) of the extravert’s thinking and feeling. Under point 3 you write that you acknowledge my intellectual and moral capabilities. Why do you speak of “moral,” and not, in parallel to point 2, of thinking and feeling capabilities? I can’t imagine that you acknowledge the feeling of the extravert only if it is moral. What do you understand by moral? Couldn’t that, which is moral to the introvert, be immoral to the extravert, and vice versa?
That you do not acknowledge the extravert’s capacity for love, indeed often debase it, is shown to me by many passages in our correspondence. I do not want to repeat them bit by bit. Should you reread your letters sometime from a superior standpoint, you will probably notice yourself the strangely affective, often downright ironic-spiteful tone with which you speak of the love of the extravert. I am convinced that any reader with a modicum of impartiality will get the impression from our correspondence up to now that you do not do justice to the psychology of the extravert in it.
On 4 June 1915, you wrote me: “I do not even know your products, because you did not yield any of them.”261 To which I answered: “Obviously you can acknowledge only very specific products of mine, namely, only intellectual ones,” and I went on saying that my most valuable products will never be intellectual ones. Our correspondence has shown me once again that to this day you have been unable to acknowledge with your feeling the extravert’s feeling capacity, his sympathy, his love, and his friendship.
I see further proof of this in the following reaction of yours: On 6 June I tried to explain to you what I mean by friendship. On 9 June you turned the tables back on myself with the words: “You should rather have a look at the resistances against me, of which you are full.” To this day I have been unable to find those resistances. I hardly believe one can speak of resistances when someone does not share the other’s opinion.
I can imagine that my feeling, “you do not acknowledge with your feeling what is valuable in the extravert,” still today impresses you as a “fantasy wandering off into the blue,” and that you will have resistances against this fantasy now as you had then.
No letter can clearly prove to you what I feel about your nonacknowledgement; this can be done, in my view, only by the knowledge you yourself gain by experiencing.
Nonetheless, I wrote you openly and honestly what I think, because you wanted it.
With best regards,
Hans Schmid
I will return home on Tuesday evening.
258 As becomes clear from the concluding sentence in this letter, Jung had invited Schmid to write “openly and honestly” about his thoughts, even if he, Jung, had already wanted to bring the correspondence to a formal end in 9 J.
259 Spoken by Christ to the congregation in Ephesus. Quoted in ancient Greek in the original; rendered here in the King James version.
260 See note 162.
261 This phrase and the following quotes from previous correspondence cannot be found in the extant letters.